Anthony Babington

12:02AM BST 25 May 2004

His Honour Anthony Babington, who has died aged 84, overcame a terrible brain injury suffered during the Second World War to become a barrister, stipendiary magistrate, circuit judge and the author of 10 intelligent and thoughtful books.

His war injury was not the first, or the last, disaster to befall him. He was born Anthony Patrick Babington in Cork on April 4 1920 into a well-known Anglo-Irish family, originally emigrants to Ireland after the Babington Conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth I. Anthony descended from the brother of Anthony Babington, a Derbyshire landowner and the ringleader of the seven plotters, all of whom were tortured and executed at St Giles's Fields in 1586.

Until the age of four, Anthony grew up in India, where his father was an engineer before, weakened by alcoholism, retiring aged 43. The family then settled at Kenley Court in Surrey. But while Anthony was at St Anselm's prep school his father died, and was subsequently found to have been near bankruptcy after investing in a failed petrol-saving scheme. Their house and estate in Co Cork had to be sold. As Anthony recalled: "The next few years at St Anselm's were marred for me by the embarrassment of poverty."

He grew into a robust, handsome youth, and at Reading School excelled at rugby. At the outbreak of war he was commissioned in the Royal Ulster Rifles. It was near Arnhem, soon after D-Day, that he was hit in the head by a shell fragment and received the wound that, it was generally thought at the time, he would never survive.

Miraculously, he did. As he relates in his moving autobiography, An Uncertain Voyage (2000), he lay in hospital in Oxford, unable to move or even speak, thinking of the girl whom he loved and longing for a visit from her. She got as far as Oxford and then, having decided that she could not face the ordeal of a meeting, returned home.

Far from giving up after this acute disappointment, he stubbornly learned to walk and speak again. Despite the paralysed right arm, the limp and the stutter that handicapped him to the end of his days, he doggedly made a career for himself both as a lawyer and a writer.

Even a bout of near-fatal tuberculosis did not deter him, and he got out of bed for the first time in eight months to sit his exams. He had an amanuensis to write down his answers, as to write them left-handed would have taken far longer than was allowed.

Other legacies of his injury included dyslexia and dysgraphia, an inability to write coherent sentences; and he had to read aloud every day to overcome the terror of speaking. He was called to the Bar by Middle Temple in 1948, but had hardly entered chambers in the Temple when another year's illness followed, this time pleurisy, resulting in the removal of half a lung. His new chambers eventually removed his name from their list of tenants, sure he would never return.

Yet return he did, driven by what he called his "selfish desire not to be excluded from life". He practised as a criminal barrister on the South Eastern Circuit for almost a decade (during which time he also endured a ruptured appendix and peritonitis), before his appointment in 1964 as one of London's youngest metropolitan stipendiary magistrates.

In the same year, at Bow Street, Babington presided at the "Topless Ladies Case". A woman in a topless dress had posed for her boyfriend on Westminster Bridge, and then the singer-turned-madam Janie Jones and her sister had similarly exposed themselves to the crowd at a film premiere. After finding them guilty of acts of indecency, Babington gave the women conditional discharges, but warned that those tempted to do the same might not get off so lightly.

In 1972 Babington was appointed a circuit judge. He earned respect and affection for the combination of shrewdness, humour and humanity he brought to the cases that he heard. He was appointed a bencher of Middle Temple in 1977, and in 1995 an Honorary Bencher of King's Inn, Dublin, for his work forging links between the two Bars.

Most of his books were written in the early morning, his greatest literary success being For the Sake of Example (1983), his tragic account, the first of its kind to appear, of the (previously anonymous) men shot for cowardice in the First World War. The book showed all Babington's innate compassion and understanding of human frailty.

His other books included his first memoir No Memorial (1954); The Power to Silence (1968); A House in Bow Street (1969); The English Bastille (1971); The Only Liberty (1975); Military Intervention in Britain (1990); The Devil to Pay (1991); and Shell-Shock (1997).

As both an author and a natural battler for human rights, Babington was for many years active in the writers' organisation International PEN, to which he often gave sage legal advice; often PEN took it, but sometimes, to its later detriment, decided not to do so.

An extremely sociable man, Anthony Babington was, until illness made it impossible, a frequent visitor to the Garrick.

He never married. But for a long period, up to the time of his death, he enjoyed a loving relationship with the childrens' writer Josephine Pullein-Thompson. They would divide their time between his cottage at Chilham, Kent, and her house in Fulham, constantly entertaining and being entertained.

But for her unremitting care, it is unlikely that a man so handicapped would have survived into his 85th year. Her devotion to him was absolute. He died on May 10.